While polls show that a majority of registered Democrats believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, paradoxically, 88% of Democrats are “enthusiastic” about Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee.
The pro-Palestine movement in the United States is continuing to organise amid an environment in which the leadership of both major parties maintains support for Israel. However, the movement is now facing a new wave of propaganda.
Major TV channels and newspapers have suddenly decided that Harris — despite years of low approval ratings, and despite the fact that her own 2020 presidential campaign imploded before it got off the ground — is a champion of the working class, people of colour, and democracy.
This is a dramatic, cynical shift. Whether it’s been made by TV channel owners to draw in viewers so that they can see a real fight between Trump and Harris, or whether it’s the doing of the political donors who feel that a President Kamala Harris will be more malleable, it’s clearly having an effect on the Democratic base.
The media apparatus now at her disposal is attempting to erase not just Kamala Harris’ arch-Zionism and dehumanization of Palestinians, but also her long tenure as a prosecutor in California, where she went after low-income people of colour with the full weight of her office.
This new narrative being pedalled is, sadly, gaining ground.
But there’s no hiding the truth when we take a close look at a woman who, throughout her career, has always been in lockstep with America’s violent political establishment.
As a senator for California, Kamala Harris co-sponsored a Senate bill against “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations in response to UN Resolution 2334, which was adopted in 2016.
The resolution in question largely affirms clauses that the US government theoretically supports, such as the cessation of illegal settlement activity.
Near the end of the Obama administration, the US representative did not veto the resolution, allowing it to pass.
Kamala Harris split with Obama. The bill she co-sponsored and boasted about expressed “grave objection” to this resolution, although Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.
On paper, perhaps the recognition of this illegality remains the US position, but in practice, successive American governments have paved the way for the annexation of more and more Palestinian land, whether through moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, increasing military funding to Israel, or allowing American citizens to participate in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians without consequence.
The Senate bill pushed by Harris vehemently rejected the UN’s mandated role, smearing the global institution of having a one-sided bias against Israel, given the large volume of resolutions drafted against the regime.
Perhaps if Israel stopped committing universally recognised and documented war crimes with the full support of Western nations, no further resolutions on the matter would need to be drafted.
The US bill also rejected any attempt to accept Palestine as a member of the United Nations. Yet Kamala Harris occasionally claims to support a two-state solution, as she recently said in her statement after meeting Netanyahu: “It’s time for this war to end in a way where … the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity, and self-determination.”
Kamala Harris: A vocal supporter of Israel
Harris, simply, does not believe this. Her record — or, as she likes to say, “the context that came before her” — shows staunch support for Israel.
This support is merely masked with liberal rhetoric that may verbalise the notion of human rights, but deny them in practice to the Palestinian people.
The Vice President is counting on the effectiveness of this facade to win the 2024 elections, although she has no intention of breaking with the position of the Biden-Harris administration, which has centred the funding and arming of the Israeli regime.
Almost every single month since the genocide began in October of 2023, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris expressed the need for humanitarian aid, declaring that their administration will “do everything [it] can” to ensure such aid is received and increased.
But the administration continued to fund and arm the Israeli regime, facilitating its attack on starving Palestinians in consecutive aid truck massacres.
Five months into the genocide, Harris met with Benny Gantz — a member of Israel’s war cabinet and a notorious former general in the Israeli army — and reaffirmed her unwavering commitment to Israel’s security. And despite her repeated statements surrounding the flow of humanitarian aid, she never once attempted to put a stop to the carnage.
She is as complicit as Genocide Joe in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The only difference between the two when it comes to their unconditional support of the Israeli regime — as one of her advisers even admitted to The Nation — is not “in substance, but probably in tone.”
Kamala Harris has long been backed by the Israeli lobby. She has spoken at AIPAC conferences in 2017 and off-the-record in 2018, and while she missed the 2019 conference, she welcomed AIPAC leaders at her office.
She has taken trips to Israel and has met with Israeli leaders on numerous occasions. Kamala Harris has publicly mourned Shimon Peres — who killed thousands of Palestinians while consolidating the Zionist project in its early decades — and praised his legacy during an AIPAC speech.
She and her husband have even served wine made in illegal Israeli settlements to their guests. Her pro-Israel record is so substantial and intimate that, given her paltry domestic accomplishments, she would be better suited to run in the Israeli elections, not the American ones.
Some have pointed to Harris’ absence from Netanyahu’s address to Congress last week as a sign of change. Yet, Kamala Harris still met Netanyahu in private.
Afterwards, she said that she would “not be silent” about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. But Harris has been silent, as a senator, as Vice President, and now, as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
Others have pointed to Harris’ stepdaughter — who has raised funds for the PCRF — as another sign of hope that the Vice President may be privately empathetic to the Palestinians’ plight.
But we must remember that President Barack Obama, in his memoirs, wrote about his friendship with renowned Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi during their time in Chicago. He attended lectures by Edward Said. Clearly, Obama was well aware of the horrors of occupation, and he, too, paid lip service to “civilian deaths” during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza.
None of this blunted his unconditional support for Israeli settlements and the pogroms of settlers and Israeli occupation forces. In 2016, he kowtowed to Netanyahu, guaranteeing $38 billion in military aid from Washington to the Israeli regime over a decade. Harris expressed her full support for this gigantic armaments package during her 2017 speech at AIPAC.
Obama’s decree has impacted Palestinian lives long after he left office, with each year since being named “the deadliest” than the one before it in Palestine. This is to say, words and gestures by no means absolve a person of guilt. The Biden-Harris administration is guilty of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and hence, by default, so is Harris.
The Democratic Party has never run principled candidates for American voters to consider. Its leadership, rather, markets hashtags as political personalities.
Kamala Harris, 59, is indeed a “brat,” as her campaign so desperately insists. One who — as singer Charlie XCX clarified, after Harris’ staffers and some Gen Z Americans adopted the title of her newest album as slang — “says dumb things sometimes.”
It is shameful to see some progressives cheer for Kamala Harris and attempt to paint her as just another girl who is “one of us.” She is a token for the establishment that has long put communities of colour in danger, through police brutality and draconian sentencing policies.
And now, as Vice President, she is presiding over the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, just as she presided over the annexation of land in the West Bank when she was a senator. Her support for the weapons companies goes hand-in-hand with her close relationship with corporate America, the prison industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex.
Should she be elected, she won’t stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to the Zionists, and she won’t stop allowing American money and American settlers from flooding into the West Bank to terrorize Palestinian families.
Like under Biden, the massive weapons shipments will be accompanied by food cans for the Palestinians who survive Israeli sniper shots during delivery. Any support for her candidacy is an endorsement of how she has conducted herself as the Vice President of this administration — a silent and obedient killer — which has made the first live-streamed genocide possible.
Progressive except Palestine
Some Palestinian Americans have found themselves targeted by self-proclaimed progressives for opposing Kamala Harris’ candidacy, or for conditioning their vote. The motivation for bullying these voters lies in preventing another Trump presidency, with proponents of Harris often arguing for the “lesser of two evils.”
Hundreds of thousands of Democrats cast “uncommitted” votes in state primaries, irreparably damaging Biden’s legacy and weakening his candidacy well before his cognitive decline made him untenable to the Democratic Party bosses.
But simply replacing one killer with another doesn’t change these voters’ conditions: an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US military funding to Israel.
Layla Elabed — head of the Uncommitted National Movement — told ABC News that this campaign will continue until the American government stops supplying Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians in Gaza. “Until we see some real movement, we’ll continue to put pressure on the administration and on her [Harris] to change course, because we need to save lives and we will be taking that into the DNC with our delegates,” Elabed said. The Democratic National Convention is set to take place between August 19 and 22 in Chicago.
Elabed also said that the uncommitted vote and the thousands of constituents they represent will vote their conscience in November. “In order to unite this party and have a fighting chance in the race to the White House, we need to have a change in policy when it comes to Gaza,” Elabed emphasised.
While many analysts have decreed that Kamala Harris may bring a shift based on the statement she made after meeting Netanyahu, her statement is no different than the dozens she’s made as Vice President.
Calling for a ceasefire and increase in humanitarian aid while also sending weapons and funds to Israel’s military to continue its genocide is not a shift in approach — it is the Biden-Harris approach. There is no excuse for anyone to omit reality when listening to the new candidate’s rhetoric.
The DNC is attempting to neutralise its progressive constituency by hiding where Kamala’s loyalty lies — with Israel — and by using her, a woman of colour, to give the impression that there will be a reversal of the violent, systemic racism practised by this administration.
It is the duty of anyone who sees themselves as part of a collective humanity to do everything in their power to avoid being swayed by this false narrative and to expose the war crimes that Harris has engaged in from within the White House.
Kamala Harris has long been adamant about expressing how “ironclad” the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is. But as we mark over 300 days of genocide in Gaza, we know that, with time, iron rusts. And when it does, this bloody empire will crumble.
Laura Albast is a Palestinian-American journalist, translator, photographer, and media analyst based in Washington, DC. Her publications and appearances include The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Prism, The New Arab, TRT World, KPFA, and other outlets.
She is currently the Senior Editor of Digital Strategy and Communications and a fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies-USA.
Follow her on X: @Lau_Bast.